My Ashcroft funded Conservative challenger, Andrew Stephenson, has been banging on about Housing Benefit and how we should return to the old system where rent was paid direct to landlords.

This guaranteed a steady stream of income to the landlord but many tenants were simply unaware of the rent that was being paid on their behalf.

I think people have the right to manage their own money and not be treated as if they are incapable of budgeting. For their part, landlords should take responsibility for checking out the people they choose as tenants, taking up references and so on.

Where there are obvious issues - such as tenants repeatedly refusing to pass rent on to their landlord – these need to be addressed. And I am on to it.

But it is a funny old world, isn’t it? Where the Pendle Conservatives are leading proponents of the nanny state.

By contrast, here is what Dr Peter King of the Adam Smith Institute wrote in 2000.

As we have seen, the majority of tenants do not receive a monthly housing benefit. Instead, payments are sent direct to their landlords. Thus for tenants receiving full housing benefit, rent levels are a matter of indifference. They need not be aware of the rent they are charged and need not develop a close relationship with their landlord.

The key issue though is that by-passing the tenant gives landlords some control over housing benefit, through their ability to set rent levels. They may also have an incentive to allocate dwellings to housing benefit recipients, since this guarantees their income. They are therefore able to ‘milk’ the system and, certainly in the case of local authorities before 1996 and housing associations, use housing benefit as de facto supply side subsidy.

A reformed benefit system should attempt to break this producer capture. This can be done by making all payments to applicants and not their landlords. Landlords should not be able to receive benefit payments direct, but only from their tenants.

This would re-establish personal responsibility on the part of the tenant and dramatically re-shape the power relations between landlords and tenants. Landlords would have to deal directly with tenants based on their contractual obligation. It would also make rent levels a significant part of that relationship again, in that landlords would have to consider the response of tenants to rent increases… There is also the important point that households would become more aware of the real cost of their housing. This, of course, is an important prerequisite if rational choices between available dwellings are to be made. Payments direct to the landlord ensure that rent levels are a matter of indifference to benefit recipients. Prohibiting the landlord from receiving payments direct would ensure that rent levels are relevant to households. This awareness of cost should serve to prevent ‘up-marketing’ and allow a more genuine market to develop.